Word: kafka
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...piece of modern music is to plead that it demands a second hearing. Last week Conductor Leonard Bernstein obliged. He led the New York Philharmonic through a performance of Lukas Foss's Time Cycle for Soprano and Orchestra, an atonal work based on poems by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche, all of them having to do with the flow of time, clocks or bells. With Adele Addison expertly taking the vocal part, the work proved to be one of Foss's strongest-a mosaiclike structure full of wispily haunting sonorities. After playing the rest of the program, Bernstein...
What critics exhume is seldom the writer who was buried. Where Goethe found perversity and disease, critics today find "true greatness," "a hero of the modern spirit," a precursor of Stendhal, Freud, D. H. Lawrence and Franz Kafka. Thomas Mann, Germany's greatest 20th century novelist, calls Von Kleist in the preface (written in 1955) to this book a "storyteller of the very first order." In this first English translation of his collected stories, the proofs are not always convincing. The compulsive violence that runs through these tales (notably Michael Kohlhaas, The Earthquake in Chile...
Innovator Foss, who is back teaching at U.C.L.A. after a year's sabbatical for composition, does not expect his system to replace the written score. He himself has just completed a fully written-out composition, Time Cycle, for Soprano and Orchestra (to texts by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche), which will be played for the first time by the New York Philharmonic this week. Between numbers, Foss's ensemble will do improvised "commentaries" on the songs. With the spread of controlled improvisation, Foss thinks the day may come when a typical concert will begin with bits of Bartok...
Apart from these personal matters, the merger joins two impressive publishing lists. Knopf (1959 sales: more than $4,000,000) has an outstanding array of dead authors-Thomas Mann, Gide, Willa Gather, Camus, Kafka, Sigrid Undset, H. L. Mencken-but is a little spottier on contemporaries, e.g., Jean-Paul Sartre, Elizabeth Bowen. John Hersey. John Updike. Random House (1959 sales: more than $12 million) has the late Eugene O'Neill and Sinclair Lewis, as well as Faulkner. John O'Hara, Robert Penn Warren, Truman Capote, Isak Dinesen, Irwin Shaw, James Michener...
...mellowness in the man. An intimate who has peeked at his diaries reports that they used to be filled "with a very funny kind of logic in which he could wear many different masks and be a new man for every person he met. They reminded me of Kafka." But recently the note of logical unreality has disappeared, and the diaries are now filled mostly with clearheaded, matter-of-fact notes about people to be seen and work to be done...